Coast

Mette Juhl Jessen and Steen Bisgaard

Related terms: amphibious, beach, ecotone, edge, line, liminal, littoral zone, shore, transition, zone

The coast is dynamic, sudden, overwhelming, rhythmic, and quiet. The coast is a meeting with deep time, with ideas of the sublime, with fear and with longing. It is transition between wetness and dryness. A meeting of elements and ecosystems, of trade and mythologies, of conquest and of calm. It is both “the land near to the sea” (IPCC 2022, 2904), and A World Picture (Lund & Carstensen 2023).

This hybrid entry seeks to contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation on ‘coast’, by pointing out a variety of logics through which the coast can be approached and understood, from governance and geomorphology to literature and art.

So, in the following, we wiggle our way through a stream of perspectives, like an eel on its way to the Sargasso Sea, seeking to introduce a variety of both visual and textural crosscurrents to coastal considerations.

Marine biologist Rachel Carson opens The Edge of the Sea poetically:

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, then returned. For no two successive days is the shore line precisely the same. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea itself is never at rest (Carson 1955, 421).

As Carson notes, dynamics are central to the coast. The extent of the coast may be demarcated by these dynamics, understanding the ‘coastal zone’ as a physical space shaped by the interplay of solid earth, oceanic water, and atmospheric forces – stretching from the offshore point where wave energy begins to affect the seabed to the inland area where the sea no longer exerts morphological, material, or chemical influence (Binderup n.d.; Burcharth & Nielsen n.d.). For planning oriented purposes, it can be delineated as "the part of land affected by its proximity to the sea, and the part of the sea affected by its proximity to land” (DHI 2017, 9).

At times, this dynamic complexity is condensed into an extreme simplicity: the map’s coastline. A line that communicates a land-sea division in a measurable and manageable moment, separating land-based structures of private ownership from seawards systems of commons. A line from which the sea is on one side, and land is on the other.

Lifting the gaze from the map, to go stand on the coast, as inside Drachmann’s scene, blurs this line. Reminding one how simplified that line is.

The coast can be a term to think with, but it is also always a physical space. A place of various sensations and agendas: cliffs and dunes, tidal flats and barrier islands, windswept and sheltered spaces, hidden coasts buried under reclamation or geological processes, breeding grounds and habitats, hard concrete edges, quays, harbors and seawalls. It can be approached from above and from within, from sea and from land. The shift of environments which the line demarcates, is not just abstract, but also felt. These differences can induce longings, a sensation of yearning, as when Aksel Sandemose’s sailor approaches the coast from the sea: “I stood on the deck and felt the seafarer’s old joy, when he sees the coast he is aiming for. The joy hovers over my head, and I bring the holy spirit down with a shot of hail” – taking down a seagull (translated from Sandemose 1953, 84).

This also holds in reverse, when the approach is from land, as when Karen Blixen (under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen), lets the young lieutenant Boris in The Monkey exclaim:

There is nothing for which you feel such a great longing as for the sea. The passion of man for the sea [...] is unselfish. He cannot cultivate it; its water he cannot drink; in it he dies. Still, far from the sea, you feel part of your own soul dying, disappearing, like a jellyfish thrown on dry land (1934, 149).

Sailing in the middle of such longings, the cruise ship in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022), becomes a dislocated coast where the beach is mimicked by chlorinated pools, a grotesque spectacle in which the idea of the coast as a threshold or line begins to dissolve. There is no longer an edge; the coast becomes something that can appear anywhere.

Entirely dissolving the logic of the dividing coastline, in Māori cosmologies, land and sea are not split but form a single continuum. This perspective rejects the premise of the binary, and thereby the defining claim of the coastline altogether (Sammler 2020). Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha (2020) propose a similar thinking. “‘Wetness is everywhere,’” they write, an all-encompassing wetness reflecting a conception of the world in which there is no such thing as dry, but rather varying degrees of wetness (192). The sea being very wet, while the desert less so. These alternative cosmologies resist the very idea of a fixed coastline, pushing us to reimagine wetness as a pervasive condition, rather than a boundary, threshold or line. Still, as Blixen’s lieutenant notices, humans cannot survive for long in the salty sea, why the coastal zone, and even the coastline does demarcate a relevant threshold, at least for human habitation.

While coasts have always been associated with risk, such as rip currents, groundings, and floods, increased sea level rise intensifies concerns on flood risk management, adaptation, protection, and retreat strategies for coastal communities. All of these are related to specific discourses, engagements and perspectives, and we think it is important to continue to understand the coast in its dynamics, as both physical and poetic: shifting, porous, dramatic, calming, an ongoing drama and a complex space to engage with.

This entry opened by giving the word to Carson and will finish by trying to pass it to the oceans, and their perspective on the coast in a far-reaching time span.

In Havbrevene (2018) by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen, the two sisters, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean exchange letters about the myth of Icarus, the little human creepy-crawlies, and a deep-time plan to once again cover the planet in blue, facilitating an “oceanic perspective” on the history of humans, the Earth, and its elements (Frank 2021). In one of their exchanges, the older, wise Atlantic, surprised by nothing, tells her younger sister, the glitter-loving Mediterranean, who adores Icarus and streams of animals, to think of the coasts as a costume, a covering soon to be lifted when the sea reclaims the Earth (once again):

Think of the coasts as a costume, all us seas are in disguise. You will not be lonely, I promise you that. We will become a mirror ball, an eye, a mother (translated from Jacobsen 2018, 37).

We hope that, by wriggling through coastal considerations, we have conveyed the coast as both a deep-time tale and a continuum, a zone of dynamic mixing, a line, and a threshold. And that in doing so, we have shown how the coast, viewed from different perspectives, resonates across traditional disciplines and genres.

References

Binderup, M. N.d. Begrebet kystzone i Naturen i Danmark. Den Store Danske, lex.dk. Retrieved April 7, 2025.

Burcharth, H. F., & Nielsen, N. N.d. Kyst. Den Store Danske, lex.dk. Retrieved May 2, 2025.

By-, Land- og Kirkeministeriet. 2024, amended. Planning Act. Consolidated Act no. 572/2024.

Carson, R. 1955. "The Edge of the Sea." In Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy, 408–678. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2021.

CERC (Coastal Engineering Research Center). 1984. Shore Protection Manual. 4th ed. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Danish Coastal Authority. N.d. Hent og vis data. Kystdirektoratet. Retrieved January 7, 2023.

Danish Geodata Agency. n.d. GeoDanmark (GeoDanmark60_NOHIST_GML3_DAF). Distributed via Datafordeler (DAF).

DHI. 2017. Shoreline Management Guidelines.

Dinesen, I. (pseudonym for Karen Blixen). 1934. "The Monkey," in Seven Gothic Tales, 105-172. Harrison Smith and Robert Haas. New York.

Frank, S. 2021. Her regerer havet: Siri Jacobsens Havbrevene og en amfibisk verdensanskuelse. Passepartout (42): 18–37.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2022. “Annex II: Glossary.” Edited by V. Möller, R. van Diemen, J. B. R. Matthews, C. Méndez, S. Semenov, J. S. Fuglestvedt, and A. Reisinger. In Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by H.-O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E. S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, and B. Rama, 2897–2930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobsen, Siri Ranva Hjelm. 2018. Havbrevene. 1st ed. Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof.

Lund, A. A., & Carstensen, J. S. 2023. "Preface." In Critical Coast, edited by A. Lund and J. S. Carstensen, 5–9. Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press.

Mathur, A., & da Cunha, D. 2020. Wetness Is Everywhere: Why Do We See Water Somewhere? Journal of Architectural Education 74 (1): 139–140.

Sammler, K. G. 2020. KAURI AND THE WHALE: Oceanic Matter and Meaning in New Zealand. In Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea, edited by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson, 63–84. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sandemose, A. 1953. Vi pynter os med horn. Translated by C. Clausen. Aschehoug. (Original work published in Norwegian as Vi pynter oss med horn).

Wenzel, F. 2022. Triangle of Sadness. Script and direction by Ruben Östlund. Photography by Fredrik Wenzel. Copyright, Plattform Produktion.